Colebrooke himself went down with fever. He took another series of observations to the snow-capped peaks from a place called Pilibhit (near Bareilly at the south-west corner of today’s Nepal frontier), but gave up the idea of pursuing the Ganges and the Jumna to their sources. Instead he deputed his assistant, Lieutenant William Webb, to make the attempt.
By April Colebrooke was too weak for anything but river travel. The fever was diagnosed as malaria, complicated by dysentery. He continued to write his journal but the sketches became fewer and the entries shorter. Drifting downriver to Cawnpore (Kanpur) in mid-August he was ‘much worse’; and the heat was greater than anything he could remember. Debilitated and delirious, he became obsessed by the monsoon thunder-clouds which piled ever higher and heavier above the river. White-flecked, they towered above him with Himalayan menace. On 12 September he wrote again of an approaching storm. The lightning and thunder continued throughout the night.
13th. The weather was so bad as to oblige us to lay
all day at Jungeera. Rainy and stormy night.
14th.—
With a date and a dash the diary ends. Robert Colebrooke died in the early hours of the morning of the twenty-first, ‘a victim to his exertions in the cause of science’ as one of his colleagues kindly put it. He was forty-five, not a great age butabout the average for Europeans in India at the turn of the century. Life, however delicious, was short. By chance he breathed his last at Bhagalpur, the place whence Sir William Jones had first hailed ‘the highest mountains in the world’.
Cousin Henry now owed it to Robert’s memory, to the nine fatherless children and the thirty-three-year-old widow, as well as to his own convictions, to present an overwhelming case for the Himalayas. Marshalling the testimony of those earlier travellers into Tibet, of Crawford in Nepal, of Jones, and particularly of cousin Robert and his assistant Webb, he laboured intermittently over his great paper On the Height of the Himalaya Mountains for the next seven years.
Like Henry, it appeared from his diaries that Robert too had become convinced that the peaks he had observed from Gorakhpur and Pilibhit were ‘without doubt equal, if not superior, in elevation to the Cordilleras of South America [i.e. the Andes]’. At Gorakhpur, Robert had reported that, while a small crowd ‘watched me and my instrument in silent astonishment’, he had taken angles to two peaks and had deduced for each ‘more than five miles in perpendicular height above the level of the plain on which I stood, which must be considerably elevated above the level of the sea’. Five miles was 26,400 feet. He could not be more precise because of uncertainty about the allowance to be made for refraction, that bending of sight-lines by the earth’s atmosphere which had so exercised Lambton in Madras. He had used the standard tables showing the deductions to be made, but he had little confidence in them.
Henry, however, was much more confident; for Webb too had submitted observations of a peak which, taken from four different stations on the Nepal border, gave a height of 26,862 feet. Moreover Webb had a name for his peak; he understood that it was called Dhaulagiri, or ‘The White Mountain’. So it still is; and within fifty feet, Webb’s height is indeed the height now given to Dhaulagiri, the world’s seventh highestmountain. But luck as much as science had produced the figure; and Henry Colebrooke then made matters worse by dismissing it as an underestimate; he reckoned Webb’s observations gave ‘more than 28,000 feet above the level of the sea’. The conclusion of Colebrooke’s paper was therefore no surprise.
I consider the evidence to be now sufficient to authorize an unreserved declaration of the opinion, that the Himalaya is the loftiest range of Alpine mountains which has yet been noticed, its most elevated peaks greatly exceeding the highest of the
By April Colebrooke was too weak for anything but river travel. The fever was diagnosed as malaria, complicated by dysentery. He continued to write his journal but the sketches became fewer and the entries shorter. Drifting downriver to Cawnpore (Kanpur) in mid-August he was ‘much worse’; and the heat was greater than anything he could remember. Debilitated and delirious, he became obsessed by the monsoon thunder-clouds which piled ever higher and heavier above the river. White-flecked, they towered above him with Himalayan menace. On 12 September he wrote again of an approaching storm. The lightning and thunder continued throughout the night.
13th. The weather was so bad as to oblige us to lay
all day at Jungeera. Rainy and stormy night.
14th.—
With a date and a dash the diary ends. Robert Colebrooke died in the early hours of the morning of the twenty-first, ‘a victim to his exertions in the cause of science’ as one of his colleagues kindly put it. He was forty-five, not a great age butabout the average for Europeans in India at the turn of the century. Life, however delicious, was short. By chance he breathed his last at Bhagalpur, the place whence Sir William Jones had first hailed ‘the highest mountains in the world’.
Cousin Henry now owed it to Robert’s memory, to the nine fatherless children and the thirty-three-year-old widow, as well as to his own convictions, to present an overwhelming case for the Himalayas. Marshalling the testimony of those earlier travellers into Tibet, of Crawford in Nepal, of Jones, and particularly of cousin Robert and his assistant Webb, he laboured intermittently over his great paper On the Height of the Himalaya Mountains for the next seven years.
Like Henry, it appeared from his diaries that Robert too had become convinced that the peaks he had observed from Gorakhpur and Pilibhit were ‘without doubt equal, if not superior, in elevation to the Cordilleras of South America [i.e. the Andes]’. At Gorakhpur, Robert had reported that, while a small crowd ‘watched me and my instrument in silent astonishment’, he had taken angles to two peaks and had deduced for each ‘more than five miles in perpendicular height above the level of the plain on which I stood, which must be considerably elevated above the level of the sea’. Five miles was 26,400 feet. He could not be more precise because of uncertainty about the allowance to be made for refraction, that bending of sight-lines by the earth’s atmosphere which had so exercised Lambton in Madras. He had used the standard tables showing the deductions to be made, but he had little confidence in them.
Henry, however, was much more confident; for Webb too had submitted observations of a peak which, taken from four different stations on the Nepal border, gave a height of 26,862 feet. Moreover Webb had a name for his peak; he understood that it was called Dhaulagiri, or ‘The White Mountain’. So it still is; and within fifty feet, Webb’s height is indeed the height now given to Dhaulagiri, the world’s seventh highestmountain. But luck as much as science had produced the figure; and Henry Colebrooke then made matters worse by dismissing it as an underestimate; he reckoned Webb’s observations gave ‘more than 28,000 feet above the level of the sea’. The conclusion of Colebrooke’s paper was therefore no surprise.
I consider the evidence to be now sufficient to authorize an unreserved declaration of the opinion, that the Himalaya is the loftiest range of Alpine mountains which has yet been noticed, its most elevated peaks greatly exceeding the highest of the
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